Park Eun-jin (Kang Ye-won, Quick, Ghost Sweepers) is a loudmouthed thirty-year-old with an abysmal track record in romantic relationships. Freewheeling and adventurous, she is also irresponsible and reckless, pushing away the timid and the cautious, yet always falling for the romantic dreams of the love-conquers-minor-details-like-my-lover’s-married-status variety. After a spectacular break-up with a co-worker, rendered in crazy, eyebrow-raising Expressionist style by director Lee Kwon (Attack on the Pin-Up Boys, 2007), Eun-jin shares a cab ride with Kim Hyeon-seok (Song Sae-Byeok, Mother, A Girl at My Door), a nerdish, awkward young man. Against all odds, they begin a courtship and eventually decide to get married. One night, however, Eun-jin finds a suspicious text message sent to her paramour’s smartphone. Angered, she enlists the help of her female cop friend So-young (Park Greena) and her doofus ex-marine brother Eun-gyul (Kim Hyun-jun) to get to the bottom of what she suspects is Hyeon-seok’s two-timing affair. What she finds out, however, is something else altogether.
My Ordinary Love Story is one seriously whacked-out piece of celluloid. Yet it is also very Korean, in the sense that few filmmakers from other countries would risk the kind of abrupt swapping of genre identities as writer Han Sang-un and adapter-helmer Lee Kwon attempt right in the middle of their movie. Their radical genre-bending strategy is only about 60 percent successful, and the end result is more jaw-dropping than satisfactory, but they deserve kudos for at least attempting something twisted.
The earlier half of the film follows the template established by My Sassy Girl (2001). Kang Ye-won acts crazy, drunk, crazy-drunk and occasionally bats her eyes cutely, to remind male viewers that, don’t worry, I am all romantic mush inside my abusive tough girl exterior. Song Sae-byeok is a bit more nuanced (not surprising, given the secrets revealed in the second half), but he also plays cute, mugging with his patented vocal theatrics. The dialogue occasionally sounds like an avalanche of romantic comedy clichés, but this is clearly an intended effect.
Kang and Song are not particularly convincing as a couple in love. Perhaps that was the whole idea and, as a comedy of mismatched tempers, the first half works okay. But there is little of the palpable growth of romantic feelings you see between, say, Lee Min-jeong and Daniel Choi’s similarly mismatched characters in Kim Hyeon-seok’s Cyrano Agency (2010). I was more amused by reactions of Park Greena and Kim Hyun-jun to Kang’s antics, both characters conceived as comic goofs, but looking more comfortable in their skins than the main protagonists.
As I have hinted above, the second half turns heavy, with Song Sae-byeok managing to deliver a believable performance while shackled to an uber-melodramatic backstory which feels inserted from another film (nonetheless told stylishly through a montage of deliberately coarse, doodle-like animation). It is a testament to Song’s acting abilities and the filmmaker’s hutzpah that the movie does not simply break apart at this point. I think Lee Kwon’s (ironic) point may be that only such an extreme situation as depicted in the second half could compel Kang and Song’s characters to communicate with each another honestly. Or perhaps it’s just the romantic cliché of “fated love” that he is celebrating.
Either way, My Ordinary Love Story is more likely to appeal to moviegoers with perverse expectations and a taste for the unusual, and disappoint those on the lookout for a more generic, not to say “ordinary,” romantic comedy.